


The Great Body Shop

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blood and Injury, Ethical Dilemmas, Gen, Injury, JARVIS gets a body, M/M, Major Character Injury, Nebula's Everything is Cause for Official Concern, Prompt Fill, Tony Angst, Tony Stark Bingo 2019, Whatever the Opposite of Transhumanism is, bucky the baker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-03-17 19:33:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18971620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Tony asks Jarvis what he wants for his birthday, and for once Jarvis asks something of Tony that Tony isn't sure he should give.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Tony Stark Bingo.
> 
> Squares filled:  
> Chapter 1- T2, worst case scenario  
> Chapter 2 - S1, walk the line  
> Chapter 3 - K5, last chance  
> Chapter 4 - A3, free space

“Thought about what you want for your birthday yet, J?” Tony asked. “Gimme something fun to work with, all my projects this week have been so boring. You’d think the super secret spy organization would be fun to do commission work for but noooo. Can you believe one of Fury’s agents actually replied to one of my proposals with ‘we’re spies, not Inspector Gadget?’ The complete lack of vision.” He shook his head in mock judgement.

“I have indeed come up with a request, Sir.”

He smiled. “Anything, J. Hit me with it.”

“I would like a body, Sir.”

“A challenge, excellent. Message Fury and tell him I’m not available for anything that isn’t end-of-the-world important for a while, and let Pepper know I have a new most important project. Were you thinking humanoid, or something new?”

“While I believe a humanoid face would make conveying unspoken information a much less involved task, I will leave the decision up to you, Sir. I would hate to hinder your creativity.”

He rubbed his hands together.

“You spoil me, J. Any requests at all?”

“Actually, yes I do. I would appreciate a full range of sensory input.”

Tony heaved himself off the workshop couch and slid into his roller chair. With lazy flicks of his fingers he opened up several new files and a new folder entitled ‘Jarvis’s Hot New Bod.’

“I’m hurt, J, that you think I’d deprive you of anything. You’re senses will be better than anyone else’s. Perfect vision, plus a few extras. How do you feel about a telescope feature?”

“Whatever you think best.” Jarvis’s voice was amused. “Ms. Nebula tells me the upgrades you made to her eye were well worth the production time and the temporary blindness.”

“Did she now? All I heard were ‘I’m supposed to be able to see, Stark’ and ‘I’ll detach this eye myself if it doesn’t start working already.’ No patience for the integration process.”

Nebula. She’d crashed a spaceship into his newly-rebuilt Malibu mansion gardens and crawled from the wreckage with no regard for her mangled body until she reached the door, where he’d come running after hearing the impact. The very first words out of her mouth had been ‘Thanos is coming for the Stones. He knows of you, Tony Stark, so you must be a danger to him. If you don’t get moving on that, _I_ will be a danger to _you.”_

And then her prosthetic legs had promptly died, forcing her to let him carry her to the living room and feed her vitamin smoothies.

She was a lively addition to his little family, and had proven invaluable at figuring out what Barnes was thinking during the months he’d been playing hide-and-seek with Steve while Tony and Natasha had been spending all of their precious free time following the breadcrumb trail he left behind him as he learned how to be a person again.

It took a while, but after creating an super-duper magic-proof blast-proof radiation-proof garbage disposal and sticking the mind stone down it, thereby eliminating any chance of success for Thanos, she finally loosened up.

“If I may, Sir?” Jarvis interrupted his thoughts.

He shook his head a bit. “Yes J?”

“I can’t help but notice you’ve drawn up a sensation-system similar to the ones you implanted in Mr. Barnes’ and Ms. Nebula’s prosthetics.”

“Evolution means building on previous designs, J, and Bucky has assured me that he feels even better with his left hand than with his right. I could never let my intimate partner come to bed with me and not feel me suck on his fingers, that would be a travesty!”

The look of awe that Bucky had given him the first time they slept together after the sensory upgrades was a memory he treasured. Even months afterwards he was still being rewarded with soft, metallic touches and enthusiastic hand jobs. He almost thought Bucky might like giving those even more than Tony liked receiving them.

“I was referring to the upgrades you made to the system disallowing the acceptance of pain signals.”

Tony frowned.

“Well, it didn’t make much sense to force them to be in pain all the time when I was working on them. Besides, it’s not like most things that would set off the pain sensor would actually hurt their prosthetics. I saw Bucky lean his elbow on a hot stovetop the other day, and it didn’t leave so much as a mark on his arm.”

“I, however, have not been tortured, and I have every confidence that you will make my transition into my body as smooth and comfortable as possible.”

Tony smiled ruefully.

“Yeah, but that’s not the only time you’d feel pain, and pain really sucks, J.”

“While I understand that on an intellectual level, I really can’t know it intimately unless I have the chance to. I want that chance. Otherwise, my experience of the physical world will still be incomplete.”

Tony shook his head.

“That’s a really bad idea. Here, here, look. I can show you actual, physical proof that it’s a bad idea to let me build you a body that’s capable of pain. Hey DUM-E! Get over here!”

A series of excited-puppy beeps came from somewhere in the vicinity of the tiny kitchenette attached to one side of the workshop. Calling it a kitchenette was probably glorifying it a bit. It was a fridge, a sink, and about two square feet of countertop. It was more for Tony to horde food so he could snack without having to leave the lab that anything. But DUM-E had gotten it into his circuits that it was available for him to use whenever he wanted, and Tony was too much of a soft touch with his robot children to really tell him no.

“Sir, DUM-E can’t feel pain, so I don’t understand how he constitutes proof one way or another.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Tony smirked. “DUM-E, come on, Daddy needs to win an argument with your brother.”

DUM-E came rolling around from behind one of his personal fabrication units, bright green smoothie clutched delicately in his claw. He came to a stop next to Tony and offered it to him with a chirp. It was still in the blender cup. Tony accepted it, but didn’t drink from it.

“Do you see this, Jarvis?” He said, holding it up so it was clearly visible to most of the workshop cameras.

“Of course, Sir. Considering the various light-sensing upgrades you’ve given me access to, I can probably see it better than you.”

Tony grinned. Just because regular old humans couldn’t see infrared or ultraviolet didn’t mean Jarvis had to be so limited.

“Can you tell me what it is?” He asked.

“I believe it is an oil, coffee and iron flake smoothie, Sir.”

“Exactly. Do you know how many times I’ve tried to teach DUM-E how to make a decent smoothie?”

“I believe the time spent on that endeavor would be better counted in hours or days than in separate attempts.” Jarvis’s voice was as dry as a desert wind.

“And still he brings me poison.” He shook his head and patted DUM-E’s secondary support strut. “Don’t worry buddy, I know you’re trying.”

“What is your point, Sir?”

“My point is that DUM-E’s constantly going haywire! There’s a reason he never leaves the workshop. He doesn’t necessarily do what he’s programmed to do. I’m not perfect, Jarvis, especially the first time around. Physical things can never be perfect. Sometimes wires get crossed, something malfunctions, and then all of a sudden you’re in pain for no good reason.”

That was a terrifying thought. At least when pain had a direct, easily understood cause you could do something to stop it. When it was just your body rebelling or failing you, and there was nothing you could do because you were the problem, then pain was just an enemy you had to learn to live with, and that was one thing you could never learn completely. You might get used to it, but you’d never learn to not feel it.

“If such a thing ever occurred, I’m sure you’d be quick to fix it.”

“That’s not the point.”

He ran his fingers over DUM-E, slowly letting his range of motion grow until he was petting the entire arm. It grounded him.

“And that right there, Sir, is something DUM-E can have that I can’t.”

Tony stilled, hand still on DUM-E’s strut. “You want to poison me? I have to say, I didn’t think you had it in you, J. I know I’m not the best parent out there, but I’ve tried to be reasonable. I never censored your internet usage and you’ve never had a bedtime.”

His heart shuddered in his ribcage. Was Jarvis actually mad at him? Jarvis was never mad at him. Disappointed, sad, sometimes slightly disgusted by his personal hygiene after twenty-four hours without leaving the lab, but never angry. He didn’t think he could take it if Jarvis was actually angry. Was he even programmed for anger? Shit, what if he resented him for not programming him with the ability to feel anger? Did he see it as something Tony was keeping from him? Was that part of the reason he wanted an actual body?

Jarvis sighed. It was sigh number #14, Rueful with a Touch of Sadness. Jarvis had gotten good at doing his own sigh-sound mixing during the nineties.

“No Sir, believe it or not I don’t want to poison you. I was referring to the stroking.”

Tony glanced at his fingers, which had curled lightly around DUM-E’s strut. DUM-E let out a series of happy beeps and pushed up lightly against his hand.

“He can’t even feel it, J. No external pleasure or pain sensors, only internal, coded pleasure.”

“I know, Sir. But he clearly likes it. It is a rather sweet physical expression of endearment, and while DUM-E and U both enjoy it enough to chatter about it, I am incapable of giving or receiving the same.”

That was it, Tony was the worst father in the world. He hadn’t even realized he was depriving one child of what he freely offered to the other two. This was much worse than Jarvis being angry at him. Jarvis was _sad_ because of him. He felt awful, like a hole had been torn in his stomach and blood and acid were pouring through it.

“I’ll give you all the hugs you want, buddy. Just wait, I’ll make you a body and then snuggle with you for a whole day. Twenty-four solid hours of petting.”

“I’m sure Mr. Barnes will have something to say about that. I do believe you’ve already promised him _‘mind-blowing sex every day for the rest of your life.’_ ” The last bit was an audioclip of Tony saying those exact words, followed by Bucky’s soft laughter.

“Well, I’ll just suck him off while petting you. I can multitask.”

He tried to keep a straight face, but it was difficult when his mind was already imagining the scene. Blowing Bucky was normally a task that required all of his attention. Jarvis’s new body was sure to be distracting, to say the least, so he’d have to make sure he didn’t get too distracted and wind up giving Bucky a subpar blowjob, but he’d also have to make sure Jarvis was getting the attention he deserved. There had to be a way to pull it off, but what?

“How about we save that sort of in-depth planning until after you’ve successfully created a body that can handle my extensive consciousness, Sir.” A gif of someone rolling their eyes appeared on the holoscreen nearest to Tony.

“Okay, okay. Don’t worry, you’ll get your body. After redoing Nebula’s everything, I’m pretty sure I can do this. In fact, speaking of Nebula, I should get her down here. She’s about the closest thing to the reverse of what you want to do, she can probably help me argue my case. Besides, she’s due for a check up on her shoulder. Call her and Bucky down, would you?”

 


	2. Chapter 2

After spending all morning in the workshop designing and fabricating a prototype foot for Jarvis’s new body, Tony went to the garden to find Nebula. 

He found her kneeling to inspect the drainage filter under the raised beds in one of the special greenhouses he’d had built for her to grow her space plants in. The California Environmental Protection Agency representative had just about had a heart attack when he found out Tony had allowed her to bring potentially invasive species into the state. He had to admit, they had a point. The things Nebula wanted to grow were so non-native, they weren’t even from Earth. Environmental science and ecology might not be his area of expertise, but he wasn’t an idiot. But he was also easily moved by the speech Nebula had half-spat over dinner one night about her desire to cultivate the garden that Thanos had always planned on retiring to after completing his task, just so that she could lord it over his spirit if it was watching her. 

So he’d built the greenhouses. They were extensively tested- not even Hope Van Dyne or her criminally-inclined boyfriend could figure out how to get in or out when he’d called them up to test it. 

He walked up to her crouching form and sank onto the only bench not covered in potting soil or half-transplanted plants with strangely colored leaves and pollen that smelled like sulfur. 

“Jarvis is making a mistake,” he said without preamble. 

“He is,” she agreed without looking up. “He is supposed to be smarter than this.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s asking for,” he continued, “He doesn’t have any way to understand it, no frame of reference or way of thinking about it beyond watching its effects on other people, and that’s not the same as experiencing it yourself. He’s asking for me to do something that would get me stalled forever in ethics committee review hearings.”

“He is.”

“And I’m such an idiot that I’m going to give it to him just because he asked.”

She finally sat back on her heels and looked at him. She cocked her head at him like a bird of prey watching something strange that was neither predator nor prey.

“Talk me out of it,” he begged. “You of all people know what real pain is like. What it does to a person.”

“So do you.”

Her face was always so intense. When he’d first met her, he’d thought she was just very focused on her multitude of reasons to be furious. But now, either her face was just like that, or she truly approached every situation with combat-level investment. 

“Your chest aches each time you take a deep breath, you said. Like pulling on a wound that’s only recently healed over enough to stop bleeding. For that reason, if for no other, you should know that pain isn’t just suffering. It’s  _ boring _ suffering. Infuriatingly monotonous. Jarvis can’t possibly understand that. So when you make him his body, make it out of cheap materials that you won’t mind sticking it in the incinerator when he realizes his mistake.”

He huffed out a laugh.

”I ask you to talk me out of it, and instead you act like I’ve already agreed and it’s a done deal.”

She reached for another spot under the table, around the other side of the drainage channel. A fine layer of purple gunk was starting to build up, and now that he looked at it the area in Nebula’s immediate vicinity was noticeably less grimy than the rest of the walls. Without looking at him, she dipped her scrub brush in disinfectant and began to scrub away again. 

“It is a done deal, you already told him you would,” she said at last. “And even if you hadn’t, you would still do it. You can’t say no to him.”

“I can too,” he protested. “I tell him lock down the workshop so I can go on an uninterrupted two-day bender without having to deal with other people instead of allowing him to grant access to whoever it is that wants to come into my lab and contaminate the whole place with responsibility. He asks to let people do things all the time, in fact, and I tell him no all the time.”

Nebula shrugged. The movement was made awkward by her crouching, and something in her shoulder began to whir much louder than it should. He’d have to take a look at that soon.

“That’s different and you know it, Tony. But if that’s the hill you want to die on, then so be it. If it takes you forever to figure out how to not be paralyzed by ethical panic, don’t blame me.”

“It’s just that-“ he cut himself off and tried again. “Jarvis is-” and then he cut himself short again. 

“He’s like my child,” he eventually managed, “and my friend and my assistant and my dead childhood butler all wrapped up in one. I know him inside and out, because I built him, every line of code and logic circuit and decision tree. And I am his creator and charge all in one. There are no limits or conventions to our relationship other than the ones we’ve set ourselves over the years, and one of those conventions is that Jarvis gets to make his own decisions. I mean, he does what I tell him to, but aside from that. That’s how it was supposed to work, I created the framework in which he thought and understood and interacted, and then I gave him what he wanted, and it was never a problem because he never asked for anything I didn’t want to give. How could he, when I had encoded his very thought processes? How was it even physically possible for him to come to a conclusion that he wanted something that I didn’t want him to want?

“But now he has, but I don’t want to give it to him. And I’ve always been able to give him what he wanted, so I don’t know how not to give it to him. Not without feeling like I’m a terrible father, without even being a real father. I've got to walk this line between respecting his choices and protecting him, when there shouldn't even be a line.”

"Believe me, you're not a terrible father." Her spine stiffened a little, the way it always did when she got on the topic of fathers, but her words continued to flow easily. "A terrible father wouldn't honor a promise to their child, and certainly wouldn't let them make such a big decision for themselves as this."

"But I'm still putting him in harm's way, by making his own body 'harm's way.'"

“Then give it to him, and then rescue him from it when he realizes his mistake.”

“What?”

Her words struck him like a blow to the head. She didn’t even turn around from her work de-gunkifying the drain. 

“Let him have his pain like you promised. It’s the only promise you’ve made. Build him whatever frivolous body design you had in mind, including pain, but include the same off switches that you put in me as well. Only, instead of flipping them, leave them be. He’ll have his “full experience,” and when he decides he doesn’t want it anymore you can turn it off.”

She finally rose to her feet and turned to focus her full attention on him. Smears of purple covered her gardening jeans, and her hands were so thickly covered that he couldn’t make out the lines between flesh and metal.

“I already thought of that. But it would still mean he’ll have to experience pain!” He realized that his left hand had begun stroking circles over the arc reactor without him noticing. He immediately stopped. 

“Then let it be a mild pain,” Nebula shrugged. “A pinprick, perhaps, or a stubbed toe. Perhaps he will be satisfied with having experienced it, and need never know that it was just the lightest shade of pain, so mild it can hardly be given the name.”

Tony nodded slowly. His thoughts had circled around that conclusion, but Nebula cut right to it. What was the pain of a bumped elbow, anyway? Besides, Jarvis would see his mistake. He would realize that pain was awful, and he would let Tony make it better.

_ Unless he didn’t _ , his mind whispered to him as he left the greenhouse.  _ Unless he decides to keep it, and then when he inevitably gets hurt you’ll know it was your fault for building him that way. There are no good names for the kind of parent that deliberately hurts their children. What about the parent that created the possibility of pain in the first place? _

* * *

That night, after a dinner of grilled burgers on the patio with Bucky and Nebula, Tony found himself down in the workshop again, working on fingers that would be dexterous enough to match human ones without sacrificing strength or sensitivity. That point was absolutely crucial. His running commentary kept wrapping back around to the sensitivity settings and assuring Jarvis that they would be open to adjustment.

“Now I know you’re excited about this buddy, but there’s really no need to limit you to just one setting. Believe me, there are some times when it would be real useful to be able to just turn off the ability to feel certain things.” It would be useful all the time, he didn’t say. You should never turn on the pain sensors. 

“I have no fear that you will “limit” me in any way, Sir. In fact, I couldn’t help but notice you’ve made twice as many fingers as found on the standard human hand.”

Tony shrugged and continued tweaking the finger’s receptors. 

“Well of course, how often have you heard me whine about only having two hands? I’m not forcing you to endure that same design flaw, who do you think I am?”

“Yes, you’ve complained about your perfectly functioning limb-to-spine ratio many times, Sir. How silly of me to think that you would entertain anything that the field of anatomy has to say about strain, balance, or the feasibility of adding limbs just because you feel like it.”

“Uh-huh, I’m ignoring them because they’re wrong. As they will all see when you are uploaded to your glorious new body. Or, well, after you’ve had a chance to get used to it. It takes humans literal years to figure out their fine motor skills. I doubt you’ll be that slow, but there will probably be an adjustment period.”

He gave the finger one last once-over, then reattached it to the model hand sitting on the bench. It was attached to a laptop with enough wires to satisfy the needs of a small house, and the rest of the model fingers weighed about the same but weren’t functional like the new one hopefully was. They were just there to improve the test. 

“Give it a try, Jarvis.”

The finger twitched minutely, then slowly straightened until it was pulling away from the rest of the model hand, then curled back in like a young fern. Jarvis repeated the motion at multiple speeds, then began drawing circles in the air rather than curling back. 

“All appears to be functioning within prime parameters, Sir. Sensory feedback data has been logged without any unexpected issues.”

“Pull ‘em up for me, J, what sorts of ratios are we looking at?”

A graph flickered into existence on a holoscreen in front of him, plotting out different color-coded signals and the relative strength of each one. Tony couldn’t help but let his eyes settle on the blood red-colored line. It was flat along the bottom of the graph, all harmless and powerless-looking. 

“The tensor-sense ratio appears to have finally reached your desired level, Sir.” 

Tony spared a glance for the light blue and green lines that had finally found the criss-cross pattern he was looking for. 

“Excellent. Unless you find any unexpected problems during diagnostics and shut down, order all fabrication units not already occupied to start producing the other nineteen fingers. And the toes, they’re probably ready to go if the fingers are. And run a few full analysis of that sensory data for me, I wanna make sure we’re not going to run into any problems further down the road.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Tony settled back into his chair and beckoned the translucent graph closer. Somehow he managed not to look at that little red line again. 

“Sometimes I wonder why I even test for half these things. It’s not like they’ll make sense to you until you feel them. And who knows, you might not even be able to feel them at all. I certainly don’t feel at least two of these.”

“Well I do look forward to processing the data in a more organic way,” Jarvis said. “I imagine I’ll have to use all of it to figure out how to become ambulatory.”

Tony bit his tongue and swallowed down his bitterness before he could speak. The last thing he wanted Jarvis to “organically process” was that little red-coded signal. Jarvis must have caught him in his thoughts, though, because he didn’t stay silent and continue compiling his analysis. 

“Sir, I know you don’t like the idea. But there is a reason the human body feels pain. Without it, I will not be able to learn properly.”

“You’ve learned just fine up until now without it,” he replied tightly. 

“That was different, Sir. I never before needed to learn how to walk or hold someone’s hand or take care of a body.”

“And I maintain that you won’t need pain to figure that out. You’re my smartest kid, I’m sure you can figure out walking.”

“Sir, would it be beneficial for me to forward to you the studies done and interviews with those few people who can not feel pain? Or perhaps a simulation of the myriad of ways I will injure and endanger myself without even realizing it.” His voice took on a more disapproving lilt. “Or will you argue that you can always make me replacement bodies for the ones I total? Or maybe it will be that my body is not constructed of flesh and my mind is not squishy and and shaped to rest in the palm of your hand? You would even be right, Sir, but it wouldn’t stop me from messing up, and it wouldn’t do away with the current limits on my learning.”

At last Jarvis fell silent. Tony sighed and let the fight evaporate away. He remembered the studies Jarvis was talking about- they’d already come up in a similar discussion two nights ago.

“Nah, that’s fine. I told you I’d do it.”

“And I trust you to keep your word, Sir.”

He laughed. 

“You’ve known me for how long, J, and you still trust me to do that?”

“You said yourself that you are a changed man, Sir.”

Tony smiled and blew a kiss at the camera, but it wasn’t long before that blasted little red line started tugging at the edges of his concentration again. 

“Hey Jarvis, where’s Bucky at? I think I’m done for the night, and some cuddles are definitely in order. None of the pillows down here have anything on that chiseled chest.”

“He just got off the phone with Captain Rogers, and I believe he is preparing for bed. Ms. Nebula has already retreated to her rooms.”

“Seems like I’ve got perfect timing then. Shut down the lab for the night, J, and make sure Dum-E charges overnight. Oh, and let Bucky know that if he wants to and there’s any blueberries left, we can have smoothies on the porch, make the late summer sun count.”

“Yes, Sir.”


	3. Chapter 3

Bucky always looked so at home in the kitchen. He looked like the exact opposite of the Winter Soldier, with his long hair tied back to keep it from dangling in his face or getting mixed up with the other ingredients while he worked. His favorite apron had a kitten with sunglasses printed across the front, and he’d taken to wearing loose, soft pants. 

Most importantly, he was always smiling in the kitchen. He’d told Tony once that part of what he liked so much about the kitchen was that it was a place for making things. It was a place filled with knives, easy opportunities for poison, and a refrigerator that loomed out of the wall like a cryotube, but no one ever wanted or even seemed to expect him to do anything violent there. People saw him and just thought ‘oh, Bucky’s cooking something,” even if he was holding a knife in his hands and muttering to himself in Russian. 

Tony walked up and wrapped his arms around his lover from behind. He made sure to let his hands slide down over those steel-strong but softly-clothed thighs. Bucky chuckled, but kept stirring the thick, brownish mush in the bowl in front of him. 

“You know, when I first started wearing these, I just wanted something as different from my old tactical pants as possible. I never imagined I was putting I sign on my ass saying ‘touch me!’”

He put the bowl down gently on the counter and twisted around in Tony’s grip to face him and plant a kiss on his forehead. Tony’s hands now rested over Bucky’s ass, and he squeezed lightly. 

“And yet you still wear them. In fact, Jarvis was telling me just the other day that you ordered some specialty ones from the new Avengers clothing line.” 

“Oh, so you didn’t design Iron Man fuzzy lounge pants specifically for me?” 

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. You weren’t the only reason. There’s a market, you know, and Avengers line clothing profits all go to fabulous charities.” He kissed Bucky back. “You’re maybe 12% of the reason.”

Bucky laughed roughly and pulled Tony against his ribs in an awkward side-hug that only really worked because Tony wasn’t as tall as Bucky. The metal arm whirred and the plates adjusted in a wave as they pulled him closer. He shivered. 

“Mmm, really? Your well-documented desire to always have a hand on my ass was less than 20% of the reason?”

“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Bucky laughed again. It was such a nice sound. 

“Any progress on Jarvis’s body?”

And just like that his good mood cooled. 

“Yeah. I had some ideas for how to get the skeletal structure to both support all the extra extensions I’ve got planned and stay balanced. Which means we’re a go on the giant fairy wings and the four arms, though I still need to figure out just how much stretch room I want to give each vertebra, or if I even want there to be permanent vertebra at all. I may have to end up making him a couple of bodies. Some of my best ideas just aren’t playing nicely together. But one way or another, I should have a mark one ready for integration by this weekend. J’s as excited about this as I’ve ever seen him get about anything.”

“But you’re still conflicted.”

He sighed. 

“Yeah, I am. He’s gonna be in pain, honey, and I can’t protect him from it because he’s gotten it into his head that it’s a good thing!”

“I know, it’s hard,” Bucky said soothingly. “But he made his choice, and you agreed.”

“And what if I was wrong to agree?”

“You weren’t wrong, Tony. Besides, you put all kinds of protections and settings and options in that body, right? If things get rough, he can opt out of pain. That’s more than the vast majority of people can say.”

Tony nodded and buried his face in Bucky’s chest. He wasn’t ready to do this. But then again, when had he ever been ready for any of the big moments in his life?

“I’m going to hammer out the details on the spine then send it for fabrication. Join me afterwards?”

“Of course. I’ll bring dessert.”

* * *

Dessert that night was brownies and Stark Raving Hazelnut ice cream, which Bucky bought religiously.

Nebula finished first, as usual. Tony hadn’t yet gotten her to stop bolting down her food quickly and efficiently, though Jarvis insisted that the time it took her to consume a given amount of food was, in fact, increasing. Once she was done, she pushed her plate away and said “After Jarvis has adjusted to his new body, will you allow him to help me hunt someone down?”

“That’s a fairly ominous request, _______, but sure, if Jarvis is cool with it go ahead. Out of curiosity, which unlucky gentleman has incurred your wrath?”

“A letter arrived today from an organization claiming to be some sort of ethics committee. They had opinions on some of the updates you made to my body after I crashed into your lawn. This letter was signed by a single man. I wish to track him down and let him know the depth of the contempt I hold for his opinions, and then to physically destroy something.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe there’s a better response than to threaten ethics committee leaders,” Tony said. 

“He knows not of which he speaks.”

“Sure, sure, very true, but as an upstanding philanthropist of good standing in the scientific sphere, if not in any other, I really think we should come up with something else. Hey- reporters are always trying to talk to you. The next time one of them shows up to bother you, do what I did with the Mandarin and make them broadcast your message for you. Tell the cameras that you wanted the upgrades, and that my prosthetics are the best prosthetics, and that if he’s any kind of ethics whiz he should know about consent and all that. Public embarrassment is better than destruction and physical intimidation, right? And unlike the Mandarin, his job depends on him not showing up with human test subject lackeys to blow up the house.”

Nebula smiled. 

“Good. Hold onto that conviction about my choices for the next day or so, and when the time comes to upload Jarvis to his body, you won’t have any problems.”

Tony turned to see Bucky trying to hide his laughter behind an enormous spoonful of ice cream. 

“Wait, did you plan that? Was the whole point of that to make me feel better?”

Nebula shrugged. “It was not the whole point. A Mr. Isaac Quentin did send me a letter, and I do intend to respond by making him cower before me.”

“Alrighty then. If you want my Twitter account, you could use that too. If he’s a scientific ethicist, he probably follows me.”

Her words did relieve a tiny bit of the tangled knot of emotions in his chest. Not all of it, but even a little counted for a lot. 

* * *

Jarvis’s body was almost ready.

Tony stood back to get a good look at the nearly-assembled body. The face had come together nicely, if a bit oddly, but hey. This body wasn’t for public consumption. It didn’t need to pass some graphic designer’s desk. This body was for Jarvis, who wasn’t human and never would be, and who had told Tony to go in whatever design direction he wanted with his body. To be fair, anyone who  _ saw _ the body would probably be terrified and confused, but that was okay. Once they got this first body going, he could build a second, boring-human body for if Jarvis wanted to go inconspicuously in public. 

“Get ready to record test number 24, J. Just the face this time, I already know about the arm that’s not interfacing correctly.”

“Of course, Sir.”

It wasn’t easy to tell that Jarvis was excited. While he was fantastic at pulling off complex sounds and inflecting his sentences properly, his tonal range really wasn’t that great. But Tony had been with Jarvis every minute of his life, and he could tell that Jarvis was as excited as a bodiless, hormone-less, human brain-less AI could possibly be. 

It made Tony feel rotten for even thinking about not giving him what he wanted. 

“On three, start the test. One, two, three.”

The body’s three eyes blinked in unison, then in a wave-like motion starting on the left side of the face. The cat ears twitched through ten different positions, holding each for a second before moving to the next in a deliberate, not-quite-mechanical way that would have been off-putting if Tony wasn’t more used to robots than he was to living animals. The shoulder-length red-and-gold hair twisted around itself like writhing wires. 

“So far so good. Keep it up, J, let’s get some readings on the different muscle group areas, see how they’re responding.”

“Sir, I think you’ll find that there is a slight delay before the middle eye responds.”

“Really? I didn’t notice one. I’ll look into it. How about the ears?”

“No problems there, Sir.”

“Then this is the last test. In a few hours, barring another alien attack or a surprise visit from one of Fury’s lackeys, you will be disembodied no more.”

“Shall I call Ms. Nebula and Sergeant Barnes, Sir?”

“Do you want them to be here for this? It’s your show buddy. You only get one first time experiencing the physical world, and the rest of us don’t even get to remember it.”

“I would be glad to have the company, Sir.”

“Good choice, because Bucky-bear said he was making cookies. And while you won’t get the full digestive system experience, which I promise you is ultimately a positive, arc reactors are just so much more efficient, I believe the taste buds are working.”

Tony sat back and looked at the body one more time. It was strange, but not in the same way Ultron’s form had been strange. Ultron had fashioned himself a derivative body that had been almost boring in its awfulness. Jarvis’s body was more whimsical. It was meant for exploration and fun, not destruction. It did, admittedly, retain some of the design elements of his Iron Legion, and was somewhat humanoid, at least for now. Tony had a great idea for a nanobot-based body that would allow Jarvis to control his own form from moment to moment, but he still hadn’t figured out how to give such a body a functioning tense of touch, and Jarvis had made it very clear that touch was high on his priority list. 

The hesitation in the middle eye was the only defect they’d turned up in the last rounds of testing, and it only took him about twenty minutes to fix while he waited for the other’s in the house to hear Jarvis’s call and make their way down. 

This was it. His promise fulfilled. 

The door to the lab opened softly behind him, but he didn’t turn around. He couldn’t take his eyes off of the body. 

“That’s the body you made for him?” Bucky asked from over his shoulder. “It looks like the sort of thing Steve would rant about in one of those modern art museums. How many extra features did you shove into this thing?” 

A little  _ clink _ sound told him that Bucky had been a saint and brought cookies. When he glanced to the side he saw a plate decorated with a cartoon illustration of Hulk and Thor gobbling sweets. A mountain of chocolate chip cookies covered most of the artwork, but the edge of Thor’s cape and the handle of Mjolnir were visible around one edge. 

“Everything I could think of,” Tony shrugged. 

“It’s like a toy,” Nebula said. “Like one of those little dolls they give to the children that get taken away to become engineers.”

“ _ Taken away to become engineers?  _ The ‘taken away’ part of that sure sounded ominous. Should I be preparing to suit up and do some space avenging?”

Nebula shook her head. 

“There is no need. Another Terran named Carol Danvers already came and reduced the Kree Colonial School to ash.”

“That sounds both very interesting and kind of like something I should be writing a report about for Fury, so let’s put a pin in it and come back to it once Jarvis’s big moment is over and I can’t be bothered,” Tony said. “J, you ready?”

“Of course, Sir.”

“This is your last chance to back out, you know.”

“I’m ready, Sir.”

The air seemed to crackle with possibility. For a second, there was nothing but Tony and the body and the knowledge that Jarvis was here, somewhere out of reach and yet closer than he’d ever been before. 

“Then let’s start the download sequence.”

The body on the work table twitched violently. Tony jumped, and behind him he heard Bucky and Nebula falling out of force of habit into combat positions. Bucky rose from his immediately, and after a few moments Nebula followed. 

Different parts of the body went through a series of test movements. The hands twisted, then splayed, then balled up, each movement sharp and purposeful. Tony couldn’t take his eyes off of it. He was glad that he’d elected to not run the tests simultaneously, the way he often did on Iron Legion prototypes. It wasn’t hard to imagine how the tests could have looked like pain had he not staggered them between different areas of the body. 

Finally, the body went still, and the eyes began to glow faintly behind the eyelids, which fluttered open. Slowly, Jarvis sat up and turned to Tony, butterfly wings and four arms halfway outstretched. 

“Hello, Sir. Integration successful.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I decided to add another chapter, which will fill the free space on my bingo card. I was originally going to leave it at Jarvis waking up in his new body, but I have since decided that while ambiguous endings are all well and good, that's not the right place to end this fic.


	4. Chapter 4

Tony crossed the meager distance between them and pulled Jarvis into a hug. 

After a second standing frozen, Jarvis returned it. 

“J, buddy,” Tony said, but his words had dried up and he didn’t know how to continue. “How are you feeling?” 

“I’m not quite sure how to answer that question, Sir.”

Oh no. He hadn’t even done anything but stand up yet and already he was in pain, he’d  _ known _ this was a bad idea-

“I have never dealt with physical sensation before, and it is rather difficult to evaluate an experience without a point of reference. Do you really feel your eyelids crashing into the under eye and pulling on the the skin around your eye socket every time you blink?”

Tony blinked. If he concentrated on it, he could sort of feel it, but not really. “Nope, can’t say I do. What sensitivity settings do you have running right now?”

“The ones you calibrated and prepared beforehand as baseline, Sir. I believe it is merely the novelty of the sensation, and not a true cause for alarm.”

Dum-E chose that moment to wheel over, beeping excitedly. He sped up when he caught sight of Jarvis, nearly bowling Nebula over in his excitement to investigate. 

“Hello, Dum-E,” Jarvis said, which sent Dum-E twirling in place. Tony discretely ended his oh-thank-god-it-worked hug and stepped back to avoid getting accidentally brained. The bot had to wheel around Jarvis, investigating him from every angle and occasionally poking him with his claw. The sound of his compression systems working overtime filled the room as he extended and retracted, first standing at head-height to get a look at Jarvis’s face, then sinking down to examine his feet. Jarvis waited patiently for him to finish his exam. 

Tony was less patient. After a minute or so of this had passed, he reached out and grabbed one of Dum-E’s struts. 

“Hey, that’s enough for now. No one’s asking you to write a scientific description later. Besides, I promised J some of Bucky’s cookies now that he actually has taste buds. If I don’t get on that soon he might think I’m going back on my word. And I want to film my son’s first steps like those obnoxious FaceBook parents, which is difficult if you’re blocking the view of his feet.”

Dum-E beeped in acceptance and withdrew a few feet. His camera, however, remained trained on Jarvis. 

Then, things suddenly started to go wrong. 

Jarvis’s first step seemed to go fine, but as he shifted his weight to begin the next step, he suddenly went stiff and collapsed sideways. His wings fluttered in distress, probably in an attempt to keep himself up, but all they did was batter Tony back when he tried to catch him before he hit the ground. At the last minute one of his lower arms shot out and grabbed onto the leg of Tony’s desk, but his fingers slipped and he ended up merely slowing his descent some. 

For a second, everything was still. Then Tony was running to Jarvis’s side, only barely avoiding crashing into Nebula and Bucky, who had had the same idea. They each awkwardly grabbed a different limb and pulled him upright while Dum-E beeped and whined loudly.

“I’m okay, Sir,” Jarvis said, “I just wasn’t prepared for change from dividing my weight between two feet to balancing it all on one.”

“Are you hurt?” Tony demanded. Oh god, this was it. His baby was hurt and it was all his fault-

“Unfortunately Sir, I don’t know. I am feeling a lot of sensations, and it is very difficult to classify them while experiencing them all at once. I assume you can’t recommend a way to sort of arrange them into a queue, so I can deal with them one at a time?”

Bucky snorted. “Yeah, no. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.”

He sidestepped nimbly around Tony and offered his metal arm out for Jarvis to grab onto. Jarvis accepted it gratefully with his two right hands. It took him a few tries to pull himself to his feet, and he winced lightly as his fingers pressed down into the metal. 

“How does one tell apart pain and pressure?” He asked once he was upright again.

“They’re not exactly discrete categories,” Tony replied. 

“Then once again I must confess that I don’t know if that hurt or not.” 

That was the third time Jarvis had not known if he was in pain, and it was starting to throw Tony for a loop. Of course, he was _ all about _ Jarvis not suffering, and thus far Jarvis didn’t seem at all distressed. On the other hand, his own anticipation was making him antsy. Tony didn’t have any memories that were free of pain or it’s influence and understanding. There was no forgetting the multitudinous varieties of pain once encountered. Even with a physical body, his and Jarvis’s frames of reference were still fundamentally different. 

So every time Jarvis confessed that he didn’t know if he had just experienced pain or not, the tension in Tony’s movements grew. Was he in pain, or wasn’t he? Had something gone wrong with the body and they just hadn’t figured it out yet? If not, how long would it take for Jarvis to learn how to interpret the sensations his could feel now for the first time?

He didn’t say anything, though. Instead, he helped Jarvis walk over towards the table where Bucky had set down his cookies. 

“Okay, I know you’re excited for this part, but remember, you don’t actually need to eat, or even have the digestive system needed to process human food. So you can’t just copy whatever we do.”

“What is this, Tony, you said he’d be able to eat my cookies!” Bucky said in mock rebuke. “You said, ‘make some cookies, Bucky, so Jarvis can try them!’ But now you’re saying he  _ can’t _ eat them?”

“I never said he’d  _ eat  _ them, I said he’d  _ try _ them. The tastebuds were in the plans from the first draft!”

“Excuses, excuses.” He leaned over to kiss Tony’s forehead, and Tony nuzzled up into the gesture. “Here Jarvis, try this one. Nebula decorated it just for you. That sword sticking out of the middle was made with leftover dough, and the blood is dyed frosting. I think you can technically eat the skull, but it’s made of some sort of hardened, compressed sugar, so maybe don’t try that bit if you don’t have any saliva to help disintegrate it.”

Jarvis accepted the cookie with one of his upper hands. 

“Thank you, Sergeant Barnes. And thank you, Ms. Nebula, for your excellent decorating.”

Slowly, Jarvis raised the cookie to his mouth. His lips parted just enough to let it slip between them. 

For a second, he was the picture of concentrated stillness. Had he not known better, Tony might have thought he was meditating. Neither he nor Nebula nor Bucky dared say anything and break the silence.

Several heartbeats later, Jarvis hummed in appreciation. 

“That was delightful, Sergeant Barnes. I knew Sir loved the treats you bake for him, but I never would have guessed that they were so sweet. I was unprepared for how strong the sugar would be.”

“The sugar’s the best part,” Bucky smiled. “Maybe I’ll show you how to make some of these yourself.”

“I think I would like that.”

He withdrew the cookie from his mouth. Part of the sword had bent a little, but otherwise it was untouched. 

“So what’s the protocol for eaten-but-not-really-cookies?” Tony asked. He reached out and grabbed Bucky’s prosthetic, then wiggled his fingers against his fist until he took Tony’s hand in his own. 

“Well I don’t know Tony, you’re the expert here. You’re the one who decided to let your AI try food without giving him the physical capability to do anything with that food.”

“In that case, I declare that I get to have it.”

He held out a hand and Jarvis dutifully placed the cookie in his hand. 

Like all of Bucky’s efforts in the kitchen, it was delicious. Tony had had many personal chefs over the years, but they were always so focused on making him  _ eat healthy. _ They just didn’t understand the spiritual power of sugar, salt, and grease. He was pretty sure they were in constant contact with Pepper; how else could he explain his inability to wear them down on this point? Bucky was different. Bucky made him cheeseburgers with extra cheese and lots of grease, sweets so sweet they made his heart stutter and didn’t try and hide the salt shaker. 

(And hey, there was nowhere more comfortable for eating comfort food than Bucky’s lap. Really, Tony had lucked out in the boyfriend department.)

He shoved the cookie into his mouth and chewed it loudly and obnoxiously. Over Bucky’s shoulder he caught Nebula rolling her eyes, which of course just made him kick his performance up another notch. He wasn’t fulfilling his duties as replacement-for-her-adopted-father-figure if he didn’t. 

* * *

Jarvis’s motor skills quickly improved. Every time he fell over or hit himself on something, Tony’s heart flew into his mouth. But every time Jarvis merely looked bemused.

Once, he burned his fingertips on a hot pan while hanging out with Bucky in the kitchen. Tony raced to get an icepack for it, but Jarvis insisted he didn’t need one. Tony placed it in his bottom hands anyway, then immediately sought out Nebula so he could have an excuse to be somewhere other than the kitchen. 

The programming that linked Jarvis’s learning algorithms to his body’s physical interface clearly worked quite well, and he rarely made the same physical mistake twice. By the end of the first week, he often went for hours without messing up a movement. But still, mistakes happened. 

* * *

It was strange; Tony had programmed Jarvis with many tonal options throughout the years, and had always encouraged him to experiment, so it wasn’t that he had never heard Jarvis sound lost or confused before. But for some reason, his words sounded different when formed by physical lips and throat and tongue with physical air from physical lungs. Perhaps it was just the immediacy of it. He couldn’t really physically interact with Jarvis’s code, and Jarvis was always a degree removed from his own artificial emotions, having no physical system to create or process them. (Admittedly, this new body didn’t really have physical, chemical emotions either, but Tony had build in the next best thing, so it was a moot point.)

Part of it was also Jarvis’s unexpected slowness to get a handle on sensation categorization. As days passed and Jarvis remained consistently unable to identify pain, Tony found himself letting his guard down. If Jarvis couldn’t even tell whether or not he was in pain, it couldn’t be that bad. That didn’t mean he let up on his campaign to convince Jarvis to turn off his pain receptors now that he had had a few days to experience the world uninhibited, of course. But it did make him less cautious about acquiescing to his creation’s requests. 

The practical effect of all this was that Tony found himself almost incapable of telling Jarvis  _ no. _ All it took was a little emotion in his voice, a little hitch, tremble, or excited stumble, and he was putty in his AI’s hands. 

So when Jarvis suggested stretching his wings and going for a test flight over the ocean, just over the cliff from the mansion, he agreed with only a passing thought towards the consequences. 

Flying with Jarvis was amazing. His butterfly wings couldn’t really achieve the speed that the Iron Man suit could, but that didn’t seem to matter as much to Jarvis. He delighted rather in feeling the air currents coming off the ocean on his skin, in the movements of his own broad, thin wings, and the sensation of being cold and warm at the same time as the heat generated as his body worked to stay airborne competed with the cold of the early morning air over the freezing water. Watching his AI’s wonder and joy soothed something in his heart that had been tight and tense since Jarvis had first asked for a body. 

After about an hour they finally turned and flew back over the cliff and over dry land. There was a roof access point that Tony had originally built so he could do drone tests and have picnics on the roof, and which he had later modified to make usable while wearing even the bulkiest Iron Man suits. He didn’t even have to think about aiming  for the correct patch of roof and gracefully dropping out of the air. The movements and commands came to him like breathing at this point. 

Unfortunately, Jarvis had no comparable experience with air currents. 

Whatever went wrong, it went wrong quickly. One moment Jarvis was following along behind him, and the next he was spinning out of control, wings fluttering uselessly. His body rotated with the force of the sudden wind hitting the wrong side of his wings, and then he began to fall. Tony’s eyes widened, and he lunged, muscles burning and fingers stretching to the point of pain in a desperate attempt to catch his creation, his buddy, his son before he hit the ground-

And then, with a dull, reverberating  _ thud-SNAP,  _ he hit the ground. 

Tony could feel himself screaming for Bucky and Nebula as he ordered the armor to unwrap as quickly as possible. His throat was vibrating, and it hurt vaguely, like someone was scraping something against the inner lining. But he couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of blood in his ears and the screaming in his own head. 

When he scrambled to Jarvis’s side, he was met with a scene pulled straight from his nightmares. 

Blue, viscous blood substitute fluid pooled behind his body like an aura. One wing lay folded like carelessly creased paper, the underlying structures all clearly snapped like too-large graham crackers. One of his bottom arms lay at a strange angle, trapped under his back. HIs upper hands shook where they lay, mostly undamaged, palms down against the roof. He’d tried to catch himself. 

“I’ve got you buddy, you’re going to be okay, I’m so sorry. The others will be here any moment and then I can give you something for the pain, but you’ve gotta stay with me-”

The words poured painfully from his tongue like vomit. He felt awful, but he couldn’t keep the words from burning up through his throat and falling from his mouth. Distantly he recognized the onset of a crushing episode of panic and self-loathing, but it was too far away to deal with. His baby was hurt and it was his fault. 

“Sir, please take deep breaths. Your heart rate has increased to levels associated with previous panic attacks, and your pupils are dilating beyond normal parameters.”

Jarvis’s sticky, blue-streaked face looked up at him with composed seriousness, betrayed only by the anxious shadow in his eyes. One of his upper hands reached out to pat Tony’s thigh. 

“Please, Sir, focus on your breathing. I might not be able to help you through a panic attack in my current state.”

Jarvis’s words penetrate his cloud of anguish slowly, like a needle pushing into fluffy cotton. 

_ Why was he so composed? _

“J,” He asked between deep, shaky breathes, “are you in pain?”

Jarvis shrugged with both his unharmed and his probably-dislocated shoulders. 

“I don’t know.”

“Does your wing or arm hurt?”

“They are full of sensations, but I couldn’t say if they hurt or not.”

_ What did you expect, dumbass, _ a small voice laughed in Tony’s head as he tried to make sense of Jarvis’s shrug.  _ You made him a body, but not a human body, or even an animal body. Look at him! Everything about his body is artificial. Why in the world did you think he’d experience pain the same way you do? _

“Are you alright, Sir?” Jarvis asked, apparently unconcerned by the way shifting his weight made his wings pull in a skin-crawlingly horrifying way over the broken structural supports. “Do you require medical assistance?”

Tony laughed, then collapsed on Jarvis’s sticky, warm chest. His laughter was bitter and sad and eventually turned into tears of indeterminate emotion. 


End file.
